This Poem Will Be Canceled

they’ll gut this one first —
the swear words,
the jagged lines that won’t rhyme,
the grit under its nails.
it’s too drunk, too loud,
slouched too far in its chair.
it reeks of whiskey
and women who never left their names.

they’ll call it unfit
for clean, white-washed discourse,
say it glamorizes vice,
glorifies filth,
drags a cigarette across the carpet
and scorches neat brains with its stain.

fine.
burn it.
it won’t be the first
and sure won’t be the last.
poems like this are born to die twice —
once in the telling,
once in the taking away.

it’ll go down
because it never apologized for bar fights,
for crooked dawns,
for lovers who stayed too long
or vanished too soon.
it put the mess
right there on the table,
spread it out like a map,
with coffee stains where the good parts lived.

you’ll call it reckless,
dangerous,
say it shouted too loud
in the hush of decorum,
laughed at the wrong jokes,
spelled half the words wrong on purpose,
let grammar run naked and wild.

but cancel this:
it still got written.
it still rattled the page
like a train gone off the rails,
splintered, messy,
maybe too raw for you.

you can’t bleach truth,
can’t press it flat
to fit a billboard or sermon.
truth sweats.
truth swears.
truth wakes hungover
and writes itself down anyway.

so cancel it,
and tomorrow it’ll rise again
in the corner of a diner,
on the lip of a napkin,
in the hands of someone
too tired for courtesy
and too alive to care.